I first met Sagal, a second generation Brit, online in 2002. I was 24; she was 21. At the time I had just started writing a daily football blog about my favorite team.  She found her way over to it, and used to leave comments on the day’s musings.  I didn’t realize that she was a she right away. 

Our early encounters centered around fervent disagreements about things like which position best suited the team’s star player and what tactics the coach should employ in the next game.  I found her opinionated and frustrating.  But noticed, too, that her rhetoric was always considered and she never let an argument degenerate into a personal attack.  Both of these rare in the cybersphere.  As the blog and its regular readers evolved into something of a community, I created a message board where users were able to upload pictures to their profiles.  Only then did I set eyes on her for the first time and realize that I had spent the last few weeks getting my ass verbally kicked by a girl.  A gorgeous black one at that.

I was intrigued.  I sent her a message telling her how cute she looked in the team shirt she had on in her profile picture.  She wrote back and told me to stop perving over her and concentrate on improving my Fantasy Football League standings.  I was hooked. 

We started exchanging regular messages outside of the blog. We talked about music, about how she’d get married to cheesecake the minute they made it legal, about what we were doing with our lives and lots of other things that seemed inconsequential until we shared them with each other.   We talked, too, about when we’d meet in person.  I started making a mental list of all the things we had to overcome to make this happen:

• There was the distance thing: she was in London; I was in NY.
• The timing thing: she was a student, I had just started up my own business and time off was not even a remote possibility.
• The finance thing: same as the timing thing.
• The religion thing: she is a Christian; I’m a dedicated agnostic. 
• The location thing: Neither of us wanted to give away the security that came with having home advantage. 
• The sex thing (That one was hers!): “We’re not planning some kind of transatlantic booty call, right?”

There were a lot of things to think about.  Not once did race feature among them.

For nine months we talked on the phone, sent small gifts, made sure to see each other via video message on all the big holidays and watched movies simultaneously.   Together, yet thousands of miles apart.   All the time I was falling in love with her and when she fedexed me a squelched slab of cheesecake with the message:  “Come to London, it tastes better here.”, I couldn’t take it anymore.  I had to go and meet my girl. 

Meeting for the first time was nerve-wracking.  Me, all pasty faced and disheveled from my six-hour plane ride and Sagal fraught with worry that I’d balked at the last minute and not boarded the plane at all. 

It turned out that winning each other over was never going to be the problem.   We had failed (or, more likely, refused) to acknowledge that in the 21st century, with all the giant strides society had made towards integration, the sight of an interracial couple was still jarring to so many people.

I had planned to stay for a week so I knew I had just seven short days for this woman to fall as madly in love with me as I was with her.  But I could also tell that she wasn’t as ready to go hurtling towards that nirvana at the same speed I was.  For all the messages and phone calls and emails we’d exchanged, there was a strong element of first day jitters when actually met in person. 

Sagal is very old-fashioned and it was still important to her to do “first things first”.  She took that week out of school and  we got to just hang out.  I met her family and her friends.  All the time I was introduced as her “friend Daniel from America”.  The first time I set off to meet her parents, who are originally from Zimbabwe, there was an intense feeling of trepidation.  She’d described them as devout Christians.  That usually spelt danger in my book.  In the end, Mama and Papa Sagal turned out to be warm, open and incredibly welcoming.  If anything, it was her Aunt and younger sister who needed winning over.  They were both convinced I was here satisfying some sort of ‘jungle fever’ (I hate that term) fetish – and the fact that we had met online did little to dispel this concern.

When we were together in public I could tell Sagal was struggling to come to terms with the looks we got when we walked hand in hand.  She told me that was why she did not enjoy public displays of affection, because it became a much bigger scene than it would were we both of the same race.  

It was frustrating to feel like we were bowing to a societal intolerance that was as absurd as it was obsolete.  Not that we once experienced the sharp end of the small-mindedness.  I’ve heard of mixed race couples that get verbally abused, or worse, for being together.  This has never happened to us.  But getting used to that feeling of being conspicuous and exposed took Sagal some time.    What bothered her most was the assumption that she was the one who had “traded up” in the partnership.  That stark absence of a sense of equality in other people’s eyes.  That was an incredibly hard thing to hear her say.  Made even more maddening by the fact that I knew she was right.    This was London in the 21st century but decades of multiculturalism still seemed to have passed many by.

That first week we spent together opened my eyes to a lot of things about Sagal.  For example, she hates the words “Queen” or “Sister” or any variations thereof to identify black women.  I found this out the tricky way when, on my sixth and final night,  I decided to try out a new pet name on her: Black Angel.   My clumsy expression of affection turned out to be the catalyst for our first fight.  She didn’t like addition of the word ‘black’.  To her it showed that in my head, I viewed this relationship as different to the ones I’d had with other women before.  Which I did, but not for the reasons she was suggesting.  This was my first long-distance relationship. I had made some sacrifices to fly across a continent to be with her and I felt I deserved a little credit for that.  Again, I’m not the smoothest when it comes to picking the right word to express myself in an argument because the minute the word “credit” left my mouth I knew it was the wrong one.  She took this to mean I now felt that she owed me something.    Suffice it to say she was not best pleased.

The London trip ended on a sour note  because the very next morning I was headed back to New York.  I hated the way we had left things.  I felt like I’d been blind-sided.  Blind-sided by something I should’ve seen coming from a mile away.    It did make a difference that she was black and I was white.  It made a difference to her.  To how she felt when we were together in public.  It made a difference to her family, and, as it turned out, to my family too.  “Aren’t there enough women for you in America?”, my mother asked.  But we both knew it wasn’t Sagal’s nationality that bothered her.

We worked past it though.  Sagal came and spent that Christmas in New York with me.  That same December I asked her to marry me.   She insisted I ask her father for her hand first.  We had our “Black Wedding”, where, according to Zimbabwean tradition, the groom pays the bride’s dowry and is formally initiated into the family, back in 2003.  A year later, we had our “White Wedding” in London.

As I write this I am sitting across from my heavily pregnant wife.  We’re expecting our second child.  A little “chocolate princess”, if you will.  We’re now living in New York and there are still the occasional stares and disapproving glares thrown our way when we are out and about.  But I’m married to the most beautiful woman in the world, so what do I care?

[Hi readers, that last bit should read “milk chocolate princess”.  – Sagal]